


There Was a Time When

by prairiecrow



Category: ReBoot (TV)
Genre: Dubious Consent, Injury, M/M, Secret Relationship, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-31
Updated: 2011-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-22 00:58:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bob wonders when things started to go so desperately wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Was a Time When

**Author's Note:**

> Nanosecond=second, microsecond=minute, millisecond=hour, second=day, cycle=week, minute=month, hour=year. Pixel=inch, bit=foot.

Too much energy. It’s everywhere. Green, virulent, gleaming with its own light in the shadows of this lower level. Your essential energy draining away under my hands, running over the patch of dirty pavement where you lie struggling to breathe.

“Glitch, containment field!”

You jerk and shudder in new agony as power on an enemy frequency wraps around your chest and belly, trying to stop the deadly flow, and I wonder what will happen if I can’t keep it together, if your virals get here too late.

**************

There was a time when we had the right amount of distance between us. A time when I knew exactly who I was and exactly who you were. A time when all the barriers of class and function were still where they should be. A time when —

... or was there?

The second we met typeface-to-typeface, I said: _Not being from Mainframe, you’ll have to forgive me — it’s taken me a while to realize the advantages of having a... **friend** like you._

I didn’t think I was being serious. Come on — with a _virus_? It was just a joke to mess with your mind. In my experience (I hadn’t met Hexadecimal yet), your kind didn’t twig to that kind of thing very fast: too caught up in obsessing over their next conquest and trying to outthink resident Guardians to appreciate the finer points of flirting. Besides, my usual pattern was shoot-’em-and-run, so long conversations weren’t exactly my _modis operandi_.

But then you turned to me and said: _A wise decision, Guardian — I won’t disappoint you._ Like a promise to fulfill a favour I hadn’t even asked yet, spoken like a caress. My eyes widened and I almost took a step back, because suddenly you were too close.

We hadn’t been in each other’s presence more than ten nanoseconds and already the line between us was breaking apart.

**************

What will happen? At the very least, Ghetty Prime might go up in code fragments: Dot has always believed that you have detonators buried all over the sector, keyed to go off if you end file. I’ve gotta admit, it would certainly be your style. The kind of guy who thinks that his own death wouldn’t be so bad if he can take his enemies with him woudn’t hesitate to —

Web crash it, who’d think a virus could bleed so much and keep compiling? But I’m not complaining, because if you go G Prime will probably be annihilated and I’m right in the middle of it, where the Game cube came down and went back up again. We won — obviously, or else I wouldn’t be here to think about it — but it looks like you learned a lesson from the last time we tangled in a Game, because this time you actually worked with me to defeat the User. Smart, because this time the User was good at what He was doing and if we’d wasted time bickering He’d have...

Yeah, well, we bickered anyway. But at least this time you didn’t try to delete me.

You cough green droplets, the spasm threatening to shake you apart. It opens the gash in your format even further, revealing depths more intimate than any I’ve seen before as you fight to speak: “Gua... Guard...”

“Don’t try to talk.” Where the crash are those virals? Where are my own people? Somebody? _Anybody?_

**************

Another screencap from our first meeting: _Precisely. You know only Guardians and Games dropped by Users are able to stabilize tears like these — and I’m so much more intimate with you now than any User... aren’t I?_

 _Class Three viruses lie the same way sprites breathe: as an essential condition of their nature._ How many times were _those_ words drummed into me at the Academy? Enough times that when you leaned over me, raising one eyebrow and fixing me with a significant stare, I wrote it off as a smokescreen and a heavy-handed attempt to manipulate me into doing what you asked. I smirked back and asked you why you wanted to go through the portal with an army, and you leaned back again and tried to wave away my concern with some inconsequential words that didn’t have a hope in the Web of working. I had your number, Megabyte.

I thought I did, anyway.

I hadn’t learned yet that you were capable of less apocalyptic desires than System-wide domination. That you played a killer guitar, for example, and were capable of giving it to a little boy to make his birthday brighter. Or that you had a sense of honor that forced you to recognize that a life was fit repayment for a life. Or that somewhere in the intricate web of shadows that was your mind, one of your never-ending plans included me in a role other than that of relentless do-gooder determined to thwart all your grandious schemes.

If I’d known, would it have made any difference?

**************

“Guardian.” Finally you manage to get the word out, but you don’t follow it up with anything else. Instead you close your eyes and lift your head and concentrate, and because I’ve been infiltrated by your energy matrix before I can sense the pulse that goes out from you, looking for other programs infected with your code. A desperate cry for help, completely unspoken but enough to make me feel dizzy.

A silent cry, answered by silence. Nobody within range.

I glance at Glitch’s screen. Your power levels are destabilizing, but I don’t know enough about Class Three dynametrics to even guess how long you’ve actually got before —

You move as if to get up. “Don’t!” I reach down and press my open hand to the hollow of your broad throat, above the hiss and shimmer of the containment field. “Save your strength. They’re coming.” _They have to be._ “You’ve got to hang on!”

You look up at me for a moment with that razored expression that doesn’t quite conceal your most predatory thoughts. Then you lie back and close your eyes again, and you smile.

**************

When the moment finally came, it felt completely unexpected — at first.

We were alone, standing in front of a console deep in the Tor and pouring over screens of readings and discussing, in barely civil cut-and-thrust, the progress of the System-wide fight against the Carnefax contagion. I’d been shuttling back and forth between the Principle Office and your fortress non-stop for the last two seconds, and although I was doing my best to keep up with your pontificating a lot of my processing power was devoted to the thought of a hot shower and a few milliseconds of downtime when our little conference was done. _Downtime with Dot,_ I thought longingly, but that was about as likely to happen as —

“Guardian!” Your voice brought me sharply back to the present from mental vids of my own bed and lilac skin. “Are you even listening to me?”

— well, as likely to happen as getting together with a virus. _Now where the Web did_ that _thought come from?_

“Hm?” I gave myself a little shake. “Oh, yeah. Sure.”

“Really?” You turned to face me fully, scowling. “Then what was I just saying?”

“You were saying that —” I coughed. “Heh. Process stutter. Would you mind repeating it?”

Fire flashed in your cold eyes: you’d lost a lot of virals in the last couple of seconds and it was taking its toll on your temper. You reared back and fixed me with a savage glare. _”Process stutter?”_ you boomed, as if it was the most ridiculous thing you’d ever heard.

I stood my ground and smiled disarmingly. You continued to glare. I sighed and rubbed the back of my neck, hating to admit it, but... “Look, it’s late, and that last round of antitoxin harmonic shields seems to be keeping the replication rate down. I’m dead on my feet. Why don’t we pick this up —?”

One nanosecond I was standing there being reasonable. The next I was slammed up against the wall with both your hands wrapped around my upper arms and your furious face less than five pixels away from mine. I yelped and tried to grab at you, but your armor gave my fingers no purchase and my feet were two bits off the floor. Not that anything I could do with my bare hands would matter against your size and strength. “Wh — _Megabyte!”_

You were looking at me closely, minutely examining every detail of my exposed skin from the neck up. Suddenly realizing what this was all about, I flushed. “I’m not infected!”

You hummed speculatively and continued the scan, until at least you conceded: “Evidently not.” Then your eyes became hooded and your voice dropped a full octave: _“Yet.”_

Something flashed between us — new, and entirely familiar. I knew what was coming next just as surely as if we’d signed a licensing agreement all those minutes ago when I’d decided that playing seductive verbal games with a Class Three was somehow a good idea. I closed my eyes and said one word: “No!”

I also knew that you’d ignore it. You hadn’t gotten where you were by paying attention to what other people thought or wanted. But as soon as your tongue touched my throat — long, slick, black, reptilian — and slithered around the nape of my neck, burning against my skin with the venomous shock of viral heat.. as soon as I felt your code sinking into mine and trying to conquer me... as soon as I heard your growling laugh, revealing the primal beast that all your fine words and elegant manners barely masked at the best of times...

I realized it was what I did want, and had wanted for a very long time. The green viral energy that flowed out of you was like a drug, pain and pleasure in one shocking hit. My Guardian protocols were enough to keep it from taking hold but I could still feel it, firing up every process path in my body, thrilling the risk-seeking subroutines that were a basic part of my personality matrix. Automatically I accessed my files on Class Three behavior and came to a conclusion, dimly sensed through the general chaos: usually these viruses infected through mechanical means. To be given code this... intimately... was highly...

 _“No!”_ Your chest pressed me into the wall and I tried to push back, to get some distance. You growled again and pinned me harder, so forcefully that I could barely breathe. “You can’t —” I gasped as you retracted your tongue and bit my neck, silver teeth sinking in just deeply enough to draw energy. “You can’t infect...!” The code exchange accelerated, red and green surging between us as you licked the wound, taking away my powers of speech as effectively as if you’d torn my throat out.

You uttered a chuckle more in keeping with your civilized persona. “Of course not, boy.” The rumble of your voice went right through me, the patterns of your mind beginning to impress themselves on mine: greed, triumph, possessiveness. I struggled harder. “But that’s not the point of the exercise. Now,” and your hands tightened on my upper arms as you suddenly sounded so gentle, “tell me you don’t want this, and I’ll let you go.”

“I don’t want this.” But I could barely choke out the words, and you laughed out loud.

“Oh, Bob.” I could feel your gloating delight in the partial link of our matrices. “And they call _me_ a liar!”

You took me right up against the wall, dropping your armor cladding and merging our formats, teeth and claws and that lithe tongue and oh yes, right _there_ , better than anything I’d ever known — or even imagined. When I begged you to stop you paid no attention. And then you took me to bed — your bed — and did it all over again.

**************

You smile. Why are you smiling? You’re on the verge of ending file, your vitals are crashing, why in the Net would you —?

**************

In time, I got used to secrets.

To the rest of Mainframe I was their Guardian, the dependable warrior who defeated every Game and stood between the citizens of the System and the Viral Evil. I coudn’t count the number of times you and I exchanged words to that effect while Dot and everyone else looked on, knowing that I’d come out on top in the end.

To you, I was an uninvited visitor at night and protests that never meant anything and cries in the darkness and something to bite, to claw, to leave marked under my virtuous uniform. In that sense I was _never_ on top. And I came to need it: the moments of shared breathing, the texture of your secret skin that no one else touched, the loss of control that you gave me every time like some twisted gift. The way you took me apart and put me back together again, always with that look of strange intensity behind the smirks and the snarls: as if I were some Game you were trying to figure out, even though you’d already won.

Sometimes I wondered why you didn’t just break my neck while I lay there moaning your name. But I never asked.

**************

You’re still smiling.

“How... fitting,” you whisper. Your cold metal hand, sheathed in armor, finds mine and closes around it with punishing force as all the lines on Glitch run into the red. “I couldn’t have planned it... better...”

I remember the detonators, and have one last breath to curse you with —

_”Megabyte!”_

— before time runs out.

THE END


End file.
